1

This article is published in German in: Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der

Entgrenzung der Künste. Epistemische, ästhetische und religiöse Formen von

Erfahrung im Vergleich, ed. by Gert Mattenklott (Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und

Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Sonderband), Hamburg 2004, S. 83-101.

English translation by Julia Bernard.

‘Seeing’ versus ‘Perceiving’

The Execution of Maximilian and The Railroad by Edouard Manet

Michael Lüthy

Both of the pictures that will be looked at in this contribution, The Execution of

Maximilian and The Railroad by Edouard Manet (1868/69 and 1872/73, illus. 1 and

2), seem altogether relevant with respect to what this volume and the symposium

which generated it were aimed at: the differentiation and relativization of different

forms of experience.1 The first of these two paintings is already pertinent via its

belonging to the genre of history painting, which is dependent upon the aesthetic

experience of the picture’s being bound up with the communication of knowledge,

1 Lecture and text have to do with a book by the author (Bild und Blick in Manet’s Malerei, Berlin

2003) published shortly before this conference, especially chapters III and V which are here partly

reprinted. As far as the analysis of the railroad picture, here the publications of Michael Diers should

be mentioned, which my considerations are indebted to, reference to which are inadvertently omitted

in my above-named book. (Michael Diers, “Vom Zug der Zeit oder Topography und Allegorie—

Manet und Monet malen die Eisenbahn”, Neue Züricher Zeitung 73, 28-29.3.1998, 66; and the same

author and Bärbel Hedinger’s “z.B. (Dampf-)Wolken—Von der Industrie in Bildern des

Impressionismus nebst einer Allegorie”, Die zweite Schöpfung—Bilder der industriellen Welt vom 18.

Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Sabine Beneke and Hans Ottomeyer [Berlin: Martin-Gropius-

Bau, 2002], 72-79.

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memory, or ideas. The representative function of history painting fastens aesthetic

experience and the production of knowledge together: it is directed at a special

perception of the object—which should be “perceived”, and at the same time “seen”

in a particular way. This basic, pictorial-systematic aspect is extended in the case of

Manet’s Execution by a pictorial-historical dimension. Within the extended history of

history painting, this painting demarcates the threshold at which the representational

model just sketched fell into a crisis: a crisis, from which the genre would not free

itself. The aesthetic and the epistemological strive here in such a dramatic way away

from one another, that the pictorial sense is left open.

The picture’s fluctuating reception confirms this. Up until the middle of the twentieth

century, it served as proof for the interpretation that Manet was primarily involved in

pure painting: whoever paints as dramatic an event as an execution with such

disinvolvement, demonstrates in an exemplary manner how content can be sacrificed

in favor of form.2 Manet thereby positioned himself, as it seemed, as a decisive

defender of painterly autonomy, which not only detached itself from the traditional

task of history painting—serving the interests of the state—but rather, with its

indifference, even rejected the obligation to say anything at all in a picture. Georges

Bataille formulated this reading most radically, as he saw the specific contribution of

Manet’s paintings to lie in their silencing any literary sense and any reference to

standard norms and conventions: “The text,” Bataille wrote, “will be extinguished by

the picture. And what the picture means is not the text, but rather its extinguishing.”3

In recent decades, in contrast, the painting’s evaluation reversed direction. Above all

in the Anglo-Saxon social history of art, it became a proof of exactly the opposite. A

painter, who turned himself to the significant events of that time, could not be an

artist only focused on canvas, brush, and paint, as seemed to be the case with his

Impressionist colleagues. Manet demonstrated himself to be much more a politicized

subject, as a “peintre engagé”. The indifference exhibited did not have the goal of

2 In this matter, see further Joseph C. Sloane, “Manet and History”, The Art Quarterly 14 (1951), 93-

106, especially here 100ff. 3 George Bataille, Manet (Geneva, 1994), 55: “Le text est efface par le tableau. Et ce que le tableau

signifie n’est pas le text mais l’effacement.” (Emphases Bataille’s.)

3

producing painterly autonomy, but was rather a carefully calculated strategy.4 But the

two opposed valuations agreed on one decisive point, which they merely assessed

differently. Apparently exactly what in Manet’s picture came apart was what, in the

classical model of representation, merges: namely what can be “perceived” in a

picture, and what is to be “seen”. This discrepancy will be examined in the following,

more specifically, via an analysis of what one could call the communicative structure

of the picture.

To begin with, however, the facts and the state of the knowledge should be given

their due, and the historical background of Manet’s paintings briefly recapitulated.5

Archduke Maximilian of Austria – according to contemporaries, a loyal, well-

meaning man with a romantic sentimentality—became a plaything of French power

politics: the main figure in an imperial interlude, in an unsuitable location, which was

doomed to failure from the beginning. The younger brother of the Austrian emperor

and former general governor of Lombardy lived, following the unification of Italy,

without any official position and in seclusion in a playful villa near Triest, which

Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, convinced him to leave with the promise of

having him crowned emperor in far away Mexico, protected by a strong French-

Austrian-Mexican alliance. As the French troops, which under the pretext of debt

collection invaded Mexico, could not break the resistance of the Mexican president

4 It was Nils Gösta Sandblad who in 1954, in his then groundbreaking study, first asked the question as

to what meaning the subject could have had for Manet. At the same time, he could show compared the

various versions of the execution picture how strongly Manet had made use of the information

available about the events in Mexico for his orientation. Since then the historical background of this

picture has been illuminated many times, among them three catalogues which have devoted themselves

primarily to this task. See Nils Gösta Sandblad, Manet—Three Studies in Artistic Conception (Lund,

1954), 109ff; Edouard Manet and the “Execution of Maximilian”, ed. Department of Art, Brown

University (Providence RI: 1981); Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Manet: The Execution of Maximilian—

Painting, Politics, and Censorship (London: National Gallery, 1992); Edouard Manet—Augenblicke

der Geschichte, ed. Manfred Fath and Stefan Germer (Mannheim: Städtische Kunsthalle/Munich,

1994). Also Oskar Bätschmann, Edouard Manet—Der Tod des Maximilian (Frankfurt/Main, 1993)

devotes itself to thoroughly examining the historical context. 5 On the person of Maximilian and the French intervention in Mexico, see “Massimilliano—Rilettura

di un’existenza”, Atti di convegno ed. Laura Ruaro Loseri (Trieste: March 4-6, 1987/1992): especially

the contributions of Adam Wandruska (“Massilimiano—L’imperatore romantico”, 11-15); as well as

John Lubinski (“Maximilian in Mexiko—Romantische Pläne und zerstörte Illusionen”, 80-87). See

also Douglas Johnson, “Die französiche Intervention in Mexiko. Zum geschichtlichen Hintergrund”, in

Edouard Manet—Augenblicke der Geschichte, 9-22”

4

Benito Juarez and his army, and beyond that France was ever more urgently

demanded by the United States to withdraw their soldiers from a Mexico regarded as

its own sphere of influence, Napoleon recognized the hopelessness of his colonial

intervention and fetched the troops back home to France, leaving Maximilian without

any defenses. The lattermost was taken into custody shortly after that, and was

executed a few days later—on July 17,1867. Napoleon’s grandiose, for Maximilian

fatal, foreign policy debacle presaged the downfall of the Second Empire, which was

to be sealed with the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War four years later.

Shortly after these distant events became known of, Manet began an almost two-year-

long period of work on the subject. Five versions were generated, from among which

only the last and final one will be examined here. Already in the first sketch Manet

established a representational scheme that he would not subsequently alter. It oriented

itself following Goya’s Execution of the Rebels on the 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid—a

picture that he could have seen during his visit to the Prado in 1865, but with

certainty was familiar with from reproductions. Manet adopted Goya’s bipolar

pictorial structure, divided into a perpetrator- and a victim-side. Likewise, he retained

the positioning of the protagonists, which are each seen in three-quarter view from

the front or the back. At the same time, he altered Goya’s representational scheme in

a significant way. Thus he reduced the group of victims to three figures: Emperor

Maximilian, and the two generals executed along with him, Mejía and Miramón. In

addition he modified Goya’s differentiated time structure, which modulated the event

into a before, a present, and an afterwards. In the Goya, some still wait for the

gunshots, while others lie already shot on the ground; Manet, in contrast, collected

everything in the culminating nowness of the discharged shot itself. With the non-

commissioned officer at the picture’s right-hand edge, he introduces a third section,

which is to be placed on the side of the soldiers, but from its handling remains

nonetheless equally isolated. Finally, the stage of the event is newly conceived.

Behind the figures, Manet hoists a wall running parallel to the surface of the picture,

which separates a narrow forward segment of space out as the scene of events. At the

left and right sides at the edge of the picture, this wall is simply cut off without any

5

indication as to how the space to either side of the segment shown might be provided

for. Also the upper and lower edges of image remain conspicuously unarticulated.

While at the lower edge of the picture the ground appears to extend under the feet of

the observer without any interruption, if the edge of the picture itself were not to be

there, above the wall a view of a hill is opened up, which is however abruptly cut off.

The perspective of the landscape background thereby has the effect of being

peculiarly set up. It gives the semblance as if another world begins beyond the wall—

or indeed another picture, since it could just as easily have to do with another picture,

for it could just as well be a painted backdrop. The spatial contradictions carry over

onto the picture’s protagonists, who have a strange placelessness. How they got into

this peculiarly inconsistent space remains just as unresolved as the where-to of their

departure, when they have performed their work.

While Goya forms compact groups clearly distinguished from one another, Manet

pulls particularly the group of soldiers apart from each other. A looser frieze of

figures results, of which it is especially to be emphasized that it also pulls Maximilian

and the two generals into it. Goya’s antagonistic opposition of those shooting and

their victims is thereby softened. The ornamental and rhythmic character of this

figural frieze are strengthened by conspicuous repetitions of color and form. These

display themselves not only within the group of soldiers—whose képis, ears, belts,

sabers, gaiters, and shoes form an iterative structure—but rather also extend beyond

that to the three being executed. This takes place via the clothing’s color becoming

similar and the white’s strongly standing out, but above all by means of the

correspondence of sweeping lines, which are to be observed as much in the belts of

the soldiers as they also are in the contour-lines of the shirts of the two generals. In

this it is significant that Manet—as can be seen in the paint layers—last of all added

the hanging white leather straps on the foremost rifle, which constitutes a visual

bridge between the groups of victims and perpetrators. A gold tone also springs from

figure to figure: runs as a stripe along Mejía’s pants, jumps to the brim of

Maximilian’s sombrero, and from there to the sabers of the soldiers. White and gold

wander through the picture, equally a “floating signifier”, which possess no fixed

6

place and no fixed meaning, but whose meaning seems to lie in this circulation itself.

In this fashion a visual rhythm is generated, which runs across the entire breadth of

the picture—beginning with Mejías’ arm at the left edge of the painting, continuing

over the individual figures, and culminating in the rifle of the non-commissioned

officer at the right. Arrived at the picture’s right edge, the rifle (which does not so

much intersect the edge of the picture as it seems to touch it) leads to the termination

of the wall, where this movement flows back through the group of observers up into

the lit urn-shaped grave monument in the upper left corner of the picture. This

rhythmical circulation runs against the chronological culmination of the action as

well as the direction of the shots. A kind of lateral drift is generated, in which the

heterogenous elements of the picture enter into an oscillating interaction which has at

the same time the effect of de-centering the viewer’s gaze and scattering it over the

pictorial field.

It should already be evident what such a description of Manet’s history painting is

directed at: the picture’s peculiar spatial shallowness, as well as something that one

could call “not seeing” while all is fully visible. For although the observer stands

immediately, without any spatial gap, in front of the execution event, he/she

nonetheless appears in a sense not to see or hear anything. In the essay already

mentioned, Bataille brings this to a culmination when he writes that one cannot

escape the impression of somnolence which this picture exudes: the image reminds

one of the “anesthetization of a tooth”.6

In order to approach this contradictory effect of Manet’s representational mode more

closely, a distinction that Umberto Eco uses in relation to the Aristotelian conception

of drama can be drawn upon.7 According to Eco, each dramatic plot contains two

different levels, which he calls “plot” and “action”. The “plot” represents the external

organization of facts, and serves at the same time to make a more fundamental layer

of the drama—the “action”—visible. He explains the distinction between them using

the example of Oedipus: an Oedipus seeking the causation of the plague, discovering

6 Bataille, Manet, 38f: “Ce tableau rappelle étrangement l’insensibilation d’une dent: il s’en dégage

une impression d’engourdissement envahissant …” 7 Umberto Eco, Das offene Kunstwerk (Frankfurt/Main, 1977), 200f.

7

himself to be a murderer of his father and husband of his mother, and blinding

himself due to that: this is the “plot” of the myth. The tragic “action” in contrast plays

itself out on a deeper-lying level, that is namely the complex combination of destiny

and guilt. While the “plot” is completely evident, the “action” is open to many and

inconclusive interpretational possibilities. The art of drama lives, according to Eco,

from precisely this tension, which is produced by the understandably constructed

“plot” and the complexity of the “action” appearing by means of it.

This distinction can readily be transferred to history painting. Goya’s Third of May

1808 stages an easily understandable plot between two opposed protagonists. Yet for

Goya it undoubtably has to do with more. In order to produce this, he proffers a series

of means. The picture is not only divided in two, but rather clearly differentiated into

a “good” and a “bad” side. There are on the one side the victims, who defenselessly

beg for pardon. The main figure, illuminated by bright light, bears wounds and with

its arms stretched above reminds one of the crucified Christ. Across from him stand

the dark, faceless, and anonymously lined-up soldiers, the aggressiveness of whose

bodies are excessively clearly inscribed. Goya makes use of a symbolic, exaggerated

mode of representation, orienting himself according to propagandistic everyday-

political graphics. This value-laden opposition takes as its task the stimulation of a

particular attitude on the part of the viewer in relation to these painted events. It does

not only show the conflict, but rather at the same time has the solution to it at the

ready, as to how this is to be evaluated. Speaking with Eco’s terminology: it shows

the “plot” in such an unequivocal, almost bold and simple fashion, that the underlying

“action” motivating the protagonists does not have to be figured out.8

Eco’s narratological distinction simultaneously permits us to recognize a

characteristic that is significant for history painting. A history picture offers the

observer a so to speak “ideal” view of the portrayed event. The ideality of this gaze

expresses itself in that the viewer would not (event-logically speaking) be able to

occupy any of the positions that the picture assigns him/her. This privileged situation

8 For the clarity of the differences between Goya’s and Manet’s versions, I am describing here Goya’s

painting as more one-dimensional than it is; on this, see the more thorough treatment in the author’s

Bild und Blick, 140f and 228, notes 218 and 219.

8

in relation to the event is possible because, among other things, he/she is not pulled

into it: he/she sees, without him/herself being seen. The ideal standpoint of the

observer correlates with the ideal intention of a history picture, which does not

exhaust itself in showing an event, whose eye witnesses we are to be, but rather much

more allows the kind of symbolical dimension to be revealed which Eco wishes to

call the “action”. The maximal visibility of the “plot” never remains a goal in itself,

but rather constitutes the precondition for reflection about the “action”’s taking place

at all.

That Manet takes up these conventions and at the same time reflects upon them

within the picture is made especially apparent by one pictorial element: the witnesses

of the execution event who look over the wall. Manet is playing here with the contrast

between the wall, upon which the eye-witnesses must climb in order to be able to see,

and the picture’s surface, through which the observer can look at the event, but which

also at the same time seems to hide him from the protagonists of the event. Thus the

eye-witnesses in the image precisely do not mirror the position of the viewer in front

of the picture, but rather make clear to him/her e contrario the uniqueness of his/her

invisible present time at the scene of events.

With the construction of this ideal situation of the observer, Manet just as much urges

them to adopt a reflective and evaluative relationship to the represented events as is

the case with respect to Goya and his picture. But precisely this will not succeed at

taking place in The Execution of Maximilian. Several of the reasons for this have

already been mentioned: the ornamentalizing pictorial structure which dissipates the

gaze, as well as the irritating shallowness of the representation, which has as much to

do with the scenery-like landscape view as it does with the individual figures,

which—but for the curves of their white leather belts—would be so flat and

disembodied as their equally dried-up shadows indicate.

Equally significant in this regard is, however, the indefiniteness of the actors. Thus

the protagonists either have no faces, or their facial expressions are empty. In this the

soldiers’ facelessness differs considerably from that of Goya’s figures. Their lost

profiles are, in the sense of Wolfgang Iser’s “Leerstellen” (empty spaces), which on

9

the basis of the conditions of the picture’s reception can be filled in as being alien,

cold, evil, or irresponsible.9 In Manet’s case, the empty spaces cannot be filled in but

rather remain semantic voids. Beyond that, a process even of defiguration seems to

set in. Above all, the closely pushed together subsidiary group of soldiers at the right

edge of the execution platoon leads to a total distortion (illus. 4). It not only remains

unclear how the dirty brown that covers parts of the face is to be interpreted, but

rather the facial flesh is so unformed that (for example) in the case of the rearmost

soldier, it is undecided whether the light section that is located where his chin would

be supposed to be, belongs to him or rather must be viewed as the only visible piece

of further soldiers which would otherwise hardly be suspected. If these figures turned

towards the viewer, then they would display not caricatures as in Goya’s case, but

rather nothing—no faces at all. The turned-away soldiers evoke a sense of emptiness,

which turns abruptly into an oppressive intensity, and display a motionlessness which

turns into the fantasmatic present of quasi-subjects.

The facial expression of Emperor Maximilian, the main figure in this event, also

seems emptied out (illus. 5). Manet finds himself before the problem of how the faces

of people who are looking death in the eye are to be portrayed—whereby he still

further intensifies this moment by representing the shot being fired. Yet instead of

strong agitation, Maximilian’s face becomes a flat disk, the contours of his beard and

nose disintegrate, the eyes change into mere black spots. Manet dissolves the face,

but so that what has been dissolved remains negatively present at the place of

dissolution. Maximilian’s physiognomy becomes a light spot, in which the “face” and

“effacement”—face and wiping clean—merge into one another.

The perhaps most surprising figure in Manet’s painting—and, at the same time, the

one which has no precedent in Goya’s painting—may be, however, the non-

commissioned officer at the picture’s right edge (illus. 6). In most cases, his

manipulations are interpreted as preparations for the coup de grace, yet if observed

more closely what he is doing is altogether unclear. The non-commissioned officer

9 Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens—Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (Munich, 4

th ed. 1994), 266ff and

284.

10

hardly pays attention to the moment of pressing the trigger, but rather stares beyond

that into the indefinite. But this may perhaps be too positively formulated: for he

appears to be mentally absent—located neither within himself nor in something

outside of himself, not really altogether “there”—so that he apparently does not

perceive the execution event itself, which is taking place in his immediate vicinity.

At the same time, this figure stands in a privileged relationship to the viewer. The

prominent placement, the visibility of his face, and the outsider position that he has in

relation to what is going on, allow him to be a hinge between picture and the

observer. His position reminds one of that of the reflexive figure within the picture

whose function Michael Fried has analyzed in an exemplary study.10

As an example,

Fried makes use of an engraving after a painting at that time attributed to Van Dyck

(illus. 7). It shows Belisarius, formerly a general in the emperor Justinian’s army,

whom three women are giving alms to. According to Fried, the clandestine main

figure of the picture is, however, the soldier—who is standing spatially closest to the

viewer, and is engrossed in observing Belisarius. Evidently he is mediating on his

fate, which brought the previously famous general poverty and blindness. In the

interpretation of this figure, Fried departs from a letter of Diderot’s, in which he

expresses admiration for this picture. It is the figure of the soldier, according to

Diderot, which makes the viewer forget all the other figures. He reiterates the

position of the viewer within the picture, and thereby becomes their image-internal

identification figure: one looks at Belisarius, so to speak, with the eyes of the soldier.

He causes the picture to become moralistic, since he makes it clear to the observer

that what is at stake has to do with contemplation of Belisarius’ destiny. One could

formulate Diderot’s thoughts using Eco’s terminology: this figure embodies the

transition from realization of the “plot” to reflection upon the deeper-lying action.

Manet’s non-commissioned officer alludes to this inner-pictorial figure, yet reverses

it into its opposite, since the non-commissioned officer precisely does not perceive

the event. Nevertheless, a surprising thing that the Belisarius engraving and Manet’s

10 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality—Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot

(Berkeley/Los angeles/London, 1980), 145ff. Cf. on this Werner Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild—

Die Krise der Kunst und die Geburt der Moderne (Munich, 1993), 148ff.

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execution picture have in common results. When Diderot wrote that one looks at the

event represented with the eyes of this inner-pictorial reflection figure, as it were, this

assertion also seems not to be misguided in Manet’s case: one looks at this event with

exactly the gaze dropping out of space and time that characterizes the non-

commissioned officer.

At this point, the difficulty with “reading” this picture—thus to connect “seeing” and

“perceiving” with one another—can be more precisely determined. For this we can

again have recourse to Iser’s term of the “Leerstelle”, which is as much determinant

for the generation of pictorial narration as it is for the constitution of the viewer’s

involvement. In Goya’s case, empty spaces respond to reception indices: for example

in the form of the faceless soldier, whose state of mind the viewer can imaginarily

complete on the basis of the pictorial and narrative context. In Manet’s case, as far as

this is concerned, empty spaces and reception indices do not meet up with one

another, but rather empty spaces with empty spaces. No figure helps the viewer to

understand it differently, as a result of which the empty spaces do not disappear, as

Iser’s reception aesthetic model provides for. In Maximilian’s facial expression we

find no references at all to the peculiarity of the faces into which he gazes, in the non-

commissioned officer’s miming no commentary on the event which is culminating

nearby, and so forth. The pictorial discourse is constantly interrupted, even

perforated. At the same time, the generation of a pictorial context is displaced onto

another level: onto the sub-semantic level of ornamental rhythm, the formal and

coloristic reiterative structure. While the figures are in this fashion formally coupled

with each other, the scenario context comes apart; and while the historical sense is

dissolved, things push their way into the foreground—luminous gaiters, shimmering

sword-handles, reddend ears. But thereby the decisive, image-determining void in the

Execution of Maximilian thereby gapes—between what Eco defines as “plot” and that

which he refers to as “action”, that is between the external and the internal context of

the represented event. While the plot is not only easy to take in at a glance and clear,

but is downright symbol-like in its exaggerated portrayal, the viewer obtains no kind

of insight into the motivational interior of the figures and the deeper significance of

12

the event being executed. The various modifications which Manet undertook between

the first design and the final version, force precisely this discrepancy—in that they

follow the contradictory course of increasing the clarity of the “plot” and the opacity

of the “action” in one go. Shots are fired—yet one does not experience why, nor what

will follow that, nor what constitutes its moral. The antinomy between indifference

and critical engagement, content and form, pure painting and politically explosive

subject—which are always eulogized as characteristics of Manet’s history picture—is

based in that. We have here to do with the paradox that the significance of the

Execution of Maximilian does not follow from what is depicted portrayed but rather

from what is not.

What does Manet’s history painting recount, or turned another way: how is history

represented in it? With the recourse to Goya’s meaning-laden painting, Manet

stimulates expectations, however in order to change the rules in the course of the

game and to entangle the viewer in a situation which he/she does not know. In this,

one aspect appears significant. In comparison with Goya’s painting it becomes clear

that Manet’s execution picture cancels the dialectic of history, which in each case

reveals itself in the opposition between two parts and can be considered a constant of

history painting since antiquity. This suspension reveals itself first of all in the

protagonists, whose behavior remains too poorly defined to really emerge as

dialectically connected with each other; further, in the pictorial-structural linkage of

opposed figural groups into a through-going frieze: and finally in the insertion of a

third part, which contradicts the duality of perpetrators and victims. In place of an

historical dialectic, in Manet a dialectic of readability and unreadability, transparence

and opacity appears. “Res gestae” and “historia rerum gestarum”, concrete event and

sense endowed via plausible narrative, are no longer to be communicated together

with one another by the picture. Either we conclude from this that the represented

events submit to no reference frameworks for values and norms or no law of origin

and effect, or else we acknowledge to ourselves that the reference framework and the

laws of what we see remain concealed. Manet’s execution picture leads history to the

boundary of its non-representability, because it is not “embodied” in the figures

13

shown and is not manifest in the action represented. It shows an event which refers to

a whole catalogue of meanings: to the morality of good and evil, or to the conflict

between individual destiny and powers above the personal level, to simultaneously

come to rest where these meanings are absent. Historical transcendence changes into

aesthetic immanence: in a “circle” of sense, within which the significant material

composing it is continually metamorphosed, reiterated, and laterally displaced—

precisely because of which it does not congeal into any fixed meaning. Aesthetic and

historical sense, visual perception, and cognition come apart in such a way that the

viewer is forced to continually determine them in opposition to one another. The

crisis which reveals itself in Manet’s picture is certainly also that of the Second

Empire, whose end began to clearly make itself felt with the Mexican fiasco. But

above all, Manet’s history painting reveals the crisis of pictorial semantics. It shows

history’s becoming non-viewable, which of necessity knocks the bottom out of

history painting.

As far as the paradoxical pictorial structure and the contradictory image-viewer

relationship are concerned, the Execution of Maximilian constitutes no special case

within Manet’s oeuvre; we encounter it repeatedly, and indeed in the case of entirely

different representational subjects. A second pictorial example should make this

clear. At first glance, The Railroad (illus. 2) seems to have nothing in common with

this execution picture: here a genre picture of Parisian “modern life”, there the

portrayal of an event far away, almost exotic Mexico; here a motif for which Manet

draws upon his immediate environment—in the upper left-hand corner of the picture,

he causes the facade of his own atelier to appear—there a subject about which he was

only informed by newspaper reports and limited photographic material, and for this

composition made use of the pictorial formula of another artist. On a compositional

level, in contrast, surprisingly many similarities are displayed. The wall in the

execution picture corresponds to the grating of The Railroad, which in both divides

out a narrow spatial area across the picture and at the same time allows what is

behind it to be visible. Even as far as the details of bodily posture, the soldiers are

comparable to the otherwise altogether different figure of the girl who looks through

14

the grating. Finally, in both paintings Manet contrasts the figure(s) on the left, who

are turned towards the viewer, with those on the right, who are turned away,

presenting a “lost profile”. Thus although both pictures are, in terms of genre and

motif, considerably divergent, via a related pictorial structure they are connected with

one another. This discovery can be extended beyond the two examples singled out.

They demonstrate themselves to be members of a series of pictures, in which with

respect to very different subjects comparable structural characteristics are repeatedly

staged. What primarily interests me here, however, is the manner in which also in The

Railroad, “seeing” and “perceiving” diverge, even come into conflict with each

other—in a conflict that actually appears to be the subject of the picture.

The Railroad shows a governess with her charge or, equally plausible, a mother with

her daughter who find themselves in a shallow spatial segment, which is defined on

the one side by the iron grating and on the other by the edge of the picture. While the

gaze of the woman transgresses the picture’s edge, the girl looks through the

mediating space of the grating. Thereby the picture’s surface and the grating, which

run parallel to one another, are analogized—as we have seen was the case with the

wall in the execution picture. Both figures stand in a specific, however very different

relation to the viewer. The woman looks at the viewer with a facial expression

occurring very frequently in Manet’s oeuvre, one that above all signals that he has

been noticed. At that same time this glance holds him at a distance, even pushes him

away a bit, like a repoussoir device. The reversed figure of the girl, in contrast,

repeats the position of the viewer within the picture. The girl stands at a boundary

within the picture: at the border with the space behind the grating, observing it. In this

fashion she finds herself so to speak both in and in front of the picture: within the

picture she sees what the viewer sees as the picture. Via their antagonistic alignment,

both figures together become a Janus-figure, which reflects the relationship between

picture and viewer—mirroring, yet breaking with it.11

11 On the self-reflective qualities of the painting see the contributions of Michael Diers referred to in

note 1, in which he discusses the interlacing of reflection about urban topography and about the métier

of the visual artist.

15

But what is decisive is, however, that the “picture within the picture” is “blind”.

Instead of the train which corresponds to the title, we see merely an amorphous cloud.

The girl—and with her, the viewer—look at a white patch. Corresponding to that, the

girl has no eyes: she is also “blind”, so that the metaphor of the “lost profile” appears

to be literal here. The “blind spot” thwarts what one could call the “visibility

promise” of a picture. Within the framework of the fictive coherence of visibility,

which a picture normally produces, the girl must be able to “see”; or formulated the

other way around, the picture must “show” the girl—and the viewer—something. On

the one hand, Manet connects the viewer and the pictorial space by means of the

figures’ nearness, their life-sized portrayal as well as via the visual contact with the

sitting woman. But on the other hand, he severs the connection between both of the

two spaces, inasmuch as he formally erases it with the white cloud. In the middle of

the picture, which has to do with seeing, an essential invisibility establishes itself.

The girl in The Railroad belongs, like the soldiers in the Execution of Maximilian, to

the fantasmatic figurations in Manet’s oeuvre, which are not to be fixed on the level

of representation, as something in them always appears to be missing or not in its

place. What has happened, for example, to the girl’s right arm and right shoulder, one

might ask oneself? Their being missing is particularly noticeable due to the fleshy,

perspectivally unshortened, spatially extended left arm. Why does the skirt balloon

out, as if it covers an enormous stomach? And is it possible that the two extremely

precisely painted globes, dangling from the girl’s ear, each exhibiting their highlights,

are to be understood as ersatz for the missing eyes? The girl’s bow elongated into an

apron has an irritating effect in another way, as it is the only pictorial element that is

turned completely frontally. Its materiality appears to clearly differentiate itself from

that of the woman’s dark-blue dress. With its shiny and rawly applied blue, changing

into silver, it oscillates between a piece of cloth and a piece of painting material. The

impression is generated as if the representational process is here brought to a halt at a

point where the materiality of the paint has not yet switched over into the materiality

of the object to be represented. The brushwork—as the materiality of paint, canvas,

and brushstroke—and the texture—as the surface structure of the represented cloth—

16

coincide. Thus the blue apron permits itself neither to be reduced to the representation

of a painting-external object nor the material reality of the picture as a picture. It is

much more the case that it presents itself as a place where the appearance of painting-

external reality and the materiality of the painting come into contact with one another.

We meet up with the painterly paradox of such a “concrete” representational means:

that the beginning and the end of the process of representation, figuration and

disfiguration, sign and meaningless spot, all flow into one another.12

Certainly the strangest place in the picture, however, must be another “point of

contact”: that involving the girl, the grating, and the white cloud of steam. Does the

girl actually look through between the bars, or does she not more likely have the

grating bars directly in front of her eyes? Manet retrospectively modified this decisive

spot. He changed the position of the bars of the grating, which thus exhibit narrower

spacing in the middle of the picture as on the sides, in addition to which he corrected

the girl’s profile, which had originally completely covered the grating bar.13

He

thereby created the present constellation, in which the bar appears to conceal the

invisible eye. The cloud into which the girl gazes is not to be found in the open space

behind the grating’s bars, but rather hangs between them. This is particularly evident

immediately above the girl’s head: the white does not continue behind the bars of the

grating, even does not touch them, but rather allows a narrow brown strip of the

background to remain. Evidently Manet painted the cloud into the picture last, with

which he filled the intervals between the bars. But that means that Manet did not so

much paint something as he effaced something. Here it is not what one sees that is

painted, nor what one does not see: what is painted is that one does not see.

Although every description of this picture almost obligatorially speaks about how the

girl looks into a cloud, it is equally clear that this cloud is in the first place plain white

12 Cf. Daniel Arasse, “Le détail—Pour une histoire rapprochee de la peinture” (Paris, 1996), 280f.

Arasse is speaking in relation to a painted piece of cloth by Titian, about how a “pan de tissu” becomes

a “pan de peinture”. For an analysis of a comparable oscillation between painting material and the

painted in Vermeer’s View of Delft, see Georges Didi-Huberman, “L’art de ne pas décrire, une aporie

du détail chez Vermeer”, La part de l’oeil 2 (1986), 102-19. 13

Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet and the Gare Saint-Lazare (Paris: Musee d’Orsay/Washington:

National Gallery, 1998), 57.

17

paint. As can be understood from the title of Manet’s picture, it stands for the steam

which is emitted by a train pulling into the Gare Saint-Lazare station—which is

located further left, outside of the picture. Yet similarly to the girl’s bow, the white

frees itself from this denotative function, in that it does not (or at least does not

adequately) refer to a referent external to the painting. The white becomes something

and simultaneously does not: becomes “no/thing”. This nothing allows illusion and

the violation of illusion, illusion and dis-illusion coincide—because it effaces the

representation precisely where it has to do with a seeing-through. In this fashion the

cloud becomes the picture’s mise-en-abîme. It doubles the picture, in order to at the

same time to trace it back to its foundations.14

The girl stands within the picture, as it was described at the beginning, for the viewer

in front of the picture, as the bars of the grating also repeat the boundaries of the

picture within it. The girl’s “not seeing” is accordingly valid—at least partly—for the

viewer as well. The paradox of painting which The Railroad displays is paralleled by

the paradox of aesthetic experience, wherein the picture appears to “contemplate” the

viewer precisely where it seems most external and material: at the places where

representation collapses and the picture runs aground. In as far as the white cloud or

also the blue apron manifest themselves as negatives within the picture, they partition

off the speech, partition off the picture. But precisely at these moments the picture

“subjectivizes” itself, we are ourselves “present” in the picture. If pragmatically

oriented seeing has as its goal structuring the field of vision as plastically articulated

space, then here in the picture’s center any plasticity is neutralized. Seeing is traced

back to its basis—to a basis that is “formless” and “inhuman”.15

14

On the mise en abîme (or “abyme”) as an artistic strategy—as a “game within the game” in the

theater or “picture within a picture”, see Lucien Dälllenbach, Le récit spéculaire—Essai sur la mise en

abyme (Paris, 1977). 15

“Formless” relates back to Bataille’s interpretation of the term; see Georges Bataille, “Informe”,

Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1970), I, 217. The adjective “inhuman” plays with a remark of Merleau-

Ponty’s about Cezanne: “La peinture de Cezanne met en suspenses ces habitudes [which regulate

human access to the world—author] et révèle le fond de nature inhumaine sur lequel l’homme

s’installe”. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le doute de Cezanne”, in same author’s Sens et non-sens (Paris,

1996), 13-33, here 21.

18

A couple of years ago, Juliet Wilson-Bareau succeeded in identifying the building

façade in the upper left corner of the picture as that of the outside of Manet’s new

studio in the rue de Saint-Petersbourg. This studio was located behind the window

that presses itself up against the furthermost bar of the grill-work.16

This detail

convinced its discoverer of the picture’s realism. What it shows is what Manet, from

his standpoint in the garden of hjs painter friend Alphonse Hirsch, in fact could

exactly have seen. For from there not only the tracks running into Saint-Lazare

station but the façade of his new studio are to be seen. The picture that had remained

a riddle up until now seemed to be decoded. It celebrated, according to Wilson-

Bareau, the new studio and at the same time his own approach to painting, which

even in the case of a so obviously plein-air picture as The Railroad was based on

work in the studio. Manet, “the most Parisian of all painters” indicated with this

evidence how important to his work the connection with the urban context was.

Precisely how the rest of his oeuvre it also mirrored the city’s changing fabric—in

this specific instance, the railroad’s entry into the old Parisian city’s precincts—as

well as the various social and political powers which formed the city.17

In fact, just as the “nothing” of the cloud fails to reveal the railroad and everything it

stands for in terms of transportation technology, and urban and social issues, the

detail of the studio façade serves not so much to demonstrate the picture’s realism,

but rather to confirm its self-reflective character, which makes visible the painting’s

nature and its being experienced. If one brings to mind that between the grating and

the façade lie extensive tracks, one will be aware of how the latter is represented too

as too close-sighted. The extent of space is clearly noticeable on the right side, with

respect to details like the switch-house and two workers on the tracks, above all in the

distance of the line of buildings, which the studio façade actually continues. The

outside of Manet’s studio, in contrast to those, has the impact of being projected onto

the picture—like the clouds of smoke, it appears to be to be another “picture within

the picture”. If we take notice of the painting process, then here the antagonistic,

16

Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, 1ff. 17 Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, 1-3; 16.

19

turning inward and outward of the pictorial structure held clamped returns again on

another level. Manet paints the outward appearance of the space, within which the

picture is generated. He paints the view of the window, behind which he finds himself

during painting—and from where, in reverse, the place the girl is located standing

and looking out from would be visible. Thus the painter finds himself both “here” and

“there”, inside and outside, in front of the picture and at the same time behind the

window that appears in the picture. The blindness of Manet’s studio window appears

thus as a final indication, that for Manet painting does not at all mean finding a

suitable standpoint, and then to paint what one sees—as the realistic interpretation of

this picture suggests, which understands it as the continuation of the sociopolitical or

literary discourses of metropolitan Paris with other means.

Manet’s paintings bring into conflict ”seeing” and “perceiving” by means of the

incongruities of their relation within the picture, as well as between the picture and its

viewer. The centrally located voids have the effect of a “painting zero”. They cancel

painting out qua discourse, reason, or cognition, but at the same time throw it qua

experience of the anti-semiotic, the unexpressable, and the fascination of the gaze,

into relief in their potentiality. Manet’s painting is permeated with a dialectic of

promise and refusal. The Railroad allows vision to become blind, and this by means

of the motif of looking and a girl, who is lost in the act of looking. On the other hand,

the provocation of the Execution of Maximilian lies in frustrating the expectation of a

closed meaning of the image calculated with history painting as the model case of a

palpable context of figures and event The opposition between aesthetics and

epistemology that is introduced into the paintings demonstrates that Manet belongs

among the decided defenders of painting’s autonomy. With many other painters of

his time, he shared the concern with eliminating “literature” in its broadest sense from

painting. This should not be connectable with any kind of text, thus even not to a

heterological “discourse” which would determine from the outside its production, and

its way of being seen. This explains the increasing tendency towards “openness” and

the “unfinished” that began to manifest itself in the painting of that time. For both

undermine the possibility of drawing a specific meaning from the picture, and

20

encourage the viewer to investigate the polysemy without being able to exhaust the

work.18

Within this large field, Manet’s uniqueness lies in not rejecting any such

“discourse” from the beginning, as the Impressionists did, who understood their

going into nature as an intervention against urban civilization. He calls upon these

discourses in an very explicit manner, only to let them dissolve before our eyes.

18

On this, see for the details Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art—Genèse et structure du champ

littéraire (Paris, 1992), especially 185ff.

Illustration 1: Edouard Manet: The Execution of Maximilian, last version, 1868/69,

oil on canvas, 252 x 302 cm, Mannheim, Städtische Kunsthalle

Illustration 2: Edouard Manet: The Railroad, 1872/73, oil on canvas, 93 x 114 cm,

Washington, National Gallery of Art

Illustration 3: Francisco de Goya: Execution of the Rebels on the 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid,

1814, oil on canvas, 266 x 345 cm, Madrid, Museo del Prado

Illustration 4:

detail of illus.1:

The Execution

of Maximilian

Illustration 5: detail of illus.1: The Execution of Maximilian

Illustration 7: Abraham Bosse after Luciano

Borzone: Belisarius Receiving Alms, around

1620/30, etching, 31,5 x 35,4 cm, Paris,

Bibliothèque Nationale

Illustration 6:

detail of illus.1:

The Execution of

Maximilian